Transcript

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>> While much of South Florida was spared that worst of Irma, Everglades City, a tiny village with about 400 residents in the southwest part of the state, was ravaged. The few residents who remained in this outpost for Irma's landfall watched a surge, up to eight feet high, inundate roughly half of the homes and businesses, all the ones that were not up on stilts, and caked the town in gray swamp slime.

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>> It's gooey, I'd say, it's squished between your toes.>> Now residents are digging out and moving on.>> Everything was all tumbled on each other this morning. There were bicycles in here.>> Those who live here seem to be taking it all in stride. Little help had arrived from the outside world the day before the storm.

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But no one seemed to be asking for much help either. In a town surrounded by marshlands, storms and floods are kina part of the deal. No one knows that more than Howie Grimm, who's lived in the town for nearly 40 years and was named acting mayor less than a week before the storm.

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>> I think it was five days. I think it was maybe for five days. Now matter of fact, the day they made me mayor pro tem, we made a resolution for a state of emergency.

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But it usually brings out the best in us.

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>> We all trying to work together. It's a small town, and this either brings out the best or the worst in you.